“Cut … cut … cut,” Carmen Williams says quietly as we drive slowly along a side road in Nova Scotia, indicating the area of almost 400 acres of public land outside of Lockeport, Nova Scotia currently slated for clearcut. Sierra Club Gretchen Fizgerald reflects on a recent birding trip in Southwestern Nova Scotia and the effects of clearcutting on tiny migratory birds and their fledglings.
Media release: A survey of birds in a forest on public land in Southwest Nova Scotia, slated to be clearcut found 31 species, 25 of which are migratory species protected under the Migratory Bird Convention Act. Birds identified included warblers, vireos, thrushes and finches.
Op-ed by Community Forests Shelburne County: “We need to see more than just words, since the biggest threat to Nova Scotia’s crown land forests stems from your continued unabated licensing of their wholesale destruction by clearcutting.”
The mostly Black residents of the Town of Shelburne’s South End community continue to worry about water and they continue to worry about their health. “It’s still affecting the Black community, and it’s still environmental racism,” says Louise Delisle, who’s been fighting for change for a very long time..
Congrats to Louise Delisle and the South End Environmental Injustice Society (SEED)! I learned a lot about activism and rural Nova Scotia from listening to them. We posted this same news release yesterday, but with a photo that is no longer current. We are reposting with a current photo of Louise and her fellow SEED members, with apologies.
Weekend video: Meet Dave, a resident of Nova Scotia’s South Shore, as he talks about the PTSD that he lives with, and his inability to find proper help. “And yet I sit here, through no fault of my own, in a position I can’t control. And when I ask for help, there is nobody listening.”
Thursday is Shades of Green day, but Shades of Green has a case of laryngitis and needs to rest her voice this week. There will be no new podcast episode until next week. Fortunately, CBC’s The Current has just released a special edition from a town hall exploring anti-black racism in Nova Scotia, including environmental racism, gentrification, and violence against women.
Reporter Rebecca Hussman braved last Tuesday’s snowstorm and attended a panel on environmental racism and the law. “The weakest link, they thought, is the African Nova Scotian and Mi’kmaq communities, so therefore we will locate anything and everything we’ve got to get rid of in and around those communities. We know they have no large incomes. We know their levels of education is lower. So let’s locate this dump over here…we don’t care.”
Both shocking and shockingly normal, My name is…, a short six-minute video gives voice to Shelburne residents worried about the state of healthcare in their neck of the woods. ER closures, lack of doctors, it’s scary to live in rural Nova Scotia these days if you need medical support.
While municipalities reliably test the quality of water delivered through the utilities they manage, rural residents who rely on wells are on their own, reports new contributor Fazeela Jiwa. Now a new organization, Rural Water Watch Association (RWW), will respond to rural community members’ calls to test their water quality, addressing concerns about living close to toxic sites like landfills or incinerators.